Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety QUOTES

2 " When news of the false alarm leaked to the press, the Air Force denied that the missile warning had ever been taken seriously. Percy, who later became a Republican senator from Illinois, disputed that account. He recalled a sense of panic at NORAD. A subsequent investigation found the cause of the computer glitch. The BMEWS site at Thule had mistakenly identified the moon, slowly rising over Norway, as dozens of long-range missiles launched from Siberia. "

― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

4 " As part of that administrative process, Butler decided to look at every single target in the SIOP, and for weeks he carefully scrutinized the thousands of desired ground zeros. He found bridges and railways and roads in the middle of nowhere targeted with multiple warheads, to assure their destruction. Hundreds of nuclear warheads would hit Moscow—dozens of them aimed at a single radar installation outside the city. During his previous job working for the Joint Chiefs, Butler had dealt with targeting issues and the damage criteria for nuclear weapons. He was hardly naive. But the days and weeks spent going through the SIOP, page by page, deeply affected him. For more than forty years, efforts to tame the SIOP, to limit it, reduce it, make it appear logical and reasonable, had failed. “With the possible exception of the Soviet nuclear war plan, this was the single most absurd and irresponsible document I had ever reviewed in my life,” General Butler later recalled. “I came to fully appreciate the truth . . . we escaped the Cold War without a nuclear holocaust by some combination of skill, luck, and divine intervention, and I suspect the latter in greatest proportion. "

― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

6 " Dropping a nuclear weapon was never a good idea. "

― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

8 " Perimeter greatly reduced the pressure to launch on warning at the first sign of an American attack. It gave Soviet leaders more time to investigate the possibility of a false alarm, confident that a real attack would trigger a computer-controlled, devastating response. But it rendered American plans for limited war meaningless; the Soviet computers weren’t programmed to allow pauses for negotiation. And the deterrent value of Perimeter was wasted. Like the doomsday machine in Dr. Strangelove, the system was kept secret from the United States. "

― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

10 " And a few months later, an opinion poll found that 54 percent of the American people wanted the United Nations to become “a world government with power to control the armed forces of all nations, including the United States. "

― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

12 " During the late 1970s, a coded switch was finally placed in the control center of every SAC ballistic missile. It unlocked the missile, not the warhead. And as a final act of defiance, SAC demonstrated the importance of code management to the usefulness of any coded switch. The combination necessary to launch the missiles was the same at every Minuteman site: 00000000. Peurifoy "

― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

14 " It was faster that way, the violation seemed trivial, and officers in the control center had no way of knowing what the enlisted men were doing in the silo. The "

― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

16 " Daniel Ford, a former head of the Union of Concerned Scientists, revealed that, among other things, the destruction of a single, innocuous-looking building in Sunnyvale, California, located “within bazooka range” of Highway 101, could disrupt the operation of Air Force early-warning and communications satellites. "

― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

18 " When Agnew and Cotter showed the committee how the new lock worked, it didn’t. Something was wrong. But none of the senators, congressmen, or committee staff members realized that it wouldn’t unlock, no matter how many times the proper code was entered. The decoder looked impressive, the colored lights flashed, and everyone in the hearing room agreed that it was absolutely essential for national security. "

― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety

20 " But one of Arnold’s commanders was too cocky and nonchalant. He once removed a dummy weapon from a storage bunker in broad daylight, put it into the back of his pickup truck, covered it with a tarp, drove right past security, and disassembled it in front of his girlfriend. Arnold thought the move was stupid and irresponsible, as well as a major breach of security. Inside the bunker, the dummy weapons were stored beside the real ones. "

― Eric Schlosser , Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety